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ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Photograph copyright, by Frederick Hollyer, London 



SWINBURNE 

BY 
GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 



Contemporary 




NEW YORK 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 

MCMV 



TJ\SSiy- 



NOV 15 i^QS 

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Copyright, 1905, by 
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 
Published, November, 1905 N 



The author makes grateful acknowledg- 
ment to Messrs Harper & Brothers for their 
permission to use the text of the authorized 
American edition of Mr. Swinburne's poems 
published by them. 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 



I 

Algernon Charles Swinburne, sprung of 
the strength of English blood, was born in 
London, April 5, 1837, the eldest son of 
Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne, and 
Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the third 
earl of Ashburnham. His childhood was 
summered in Northumberland and win- 
tered in the Isle of Wight, so that the an- 
cestry of his senses as well as of his blood 
was of the sea. He was bred at Eton and 
Oxford, where though not undistinguish- 
ed in scholarship he took no degree. He 
became acquainted with Italy and France 
[3] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
by travel. From his boyhood and in college 
days he was devoted to the literary life, 
and thereafter literature was his sole ca- 
reer. A life secluded in friendships and 
studies has been his portion, as a man; 
and the fruits of it, by which he lives to 
the public, are an abundance of prose and 
verse which has come forth unintermit- 
tently for nearly forty years ; he stands now 
alone, the last of the great English poets of 
the nineteenth century, with a fame never 
to be forgotten in the annals of that time 
thronged though it be with poetic names 
and voices of matchless splendor and music. 

II 

The gift of Swinburne is to be capable of 

passion. Enthusiasm is inseparable from 

[4] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
him. Perhaps the simplest aspect of his gen- 
ius lies in his revolutionary songs. The old 
French fire burns its last in his torch. It is 
the flame that descended for an hour upon 
Coleridge, that wrapped Shelley life-long 
and in death, that by tradition now belongs 
to the English race of poets from Milton to 
Landor with every well-loved name to aid ; 
and in his generation Swinburne will ever 
be remembered as its herald, a figure sole 
and supereminent, the poet-republican 

"I am the trumpet at thy lips, thy clarion 
Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath," — 

that is his attitude, in the modern battle 
for liberty, like Taillefer at Hastings. It 
began with his songs for Italy, in the great 
days of her patriots, the first-fruits of his 
[5] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
sympathies with the land and of his per- 
sonal admiration for Mazzini. He does not 
state the grounds of his faith, for it is not 
an intellectual passion that seizes on him; 
it is a fervour that burns, an exaltation that 
lifts and heightens, a flood of feeling that 
pours forth and inundates with light and 
music and with the confluence of many 
strengths in one superb moral force — the 
revolutionary cause. Its monotone, though 
in part due to the quality of the resonance 
and to the sameness of the imagery, is es- 
sentially emotional, the monotone of pro- 
found and unchangeable depth in the feel- 
ing itself which is a constituent of the eternal 
nature of man. The passion is a capacity to 
hate as well as to love. There is no such 
master of the curse, in modern days. He 
[6] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
strikes home and to the pit with it, and 
with a mien and phrase and a volleying 
after of fire and wrath fit to hurl Satan 
down to the abyss. These are curses to 
rejoice the heart. They mark their vic- 
tims indelibly for hell. Vice versa his 
hymns to Landor, Victor Hugo and Maz- 
zini are adorations. These three were the 
living hands that had fed him in youth 
with their touch, their words, their pres- 
ence on earth. The fire they nursed 
though they did not kindle, had long life 
in it, a deep core of heat ; and whether the 
year was '66 or yesterday, whether the 
scene was Rome or Paris, Crete or Mus- 
covy, the poet still brooded there the pas- 
sion-bolts of his invective or paeans for 
victor and martyr. In his own land Swin- 
[7] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
burne's revolutionary ardour changed and 
took a new form in an illimitable patriot- 
ism, a pride in England, an Elizabethan 
might of land-love that carried the fate of 
the Armada in its bosom as its dearest 
memory and expressed itself in an exu- 
berance of panegyric and delight that 
makes his verse seem contemporaneous 
with English liberty and the ocean-rhythm 
of England's empire. This love of liberty 
and dedication to mankind had, too, its 
far fount, under dark centuries, in Athens, 

"Dear city of men without master or lord; " 

thence the poet had drank, most truly, the 
draught of his inspiration, the intoxica- 
tion of his faith in man. The stream of his 
revolutionary song is unmatched in vol- 
[8] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
ume, splendour and force; it has flowed 
life-long, and still wells; it is blended of 
many loves of persons and histories and 
memories, of time and of eternity; it is a 
great passion, great in personal intensity, 
great in its human outreaching and up- 
lifting aspiration, great in sincerity. Here 
is immense manhood-strength, seeking, by 
the poet's right, to pour itself through the 
impoverished veins of miserable men." 

Ill 

Even in so brief an opening glance at 
Swinburne's work the fact of his scholar- 
ship, his provenience from literature, 
stands prominently forth. I suppose that 
no English poet has ever had so wide and 
familiar acquaintance with the poetry of 

[9] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
foreign climes. He began with a felicitous 
command of the classical and romance 
languages. He took the Taylorian prize, 
in his college days, for French and Italian, 
and won other similar distinction in the 
ancient tongues. He has written, as a poet, 
in Greek, Latin and French with literary 
mastery. In English his studies have been 
prolonged and comprehensive, and not re- 
stricted to poetry. Out of this varied 
scholarship sprang his prose works, a long 
series beginning with his elaborate expo- 
sition of Blake's genius and including for 
its bulk an examination of the Elizabethan 
drama, together with the study of Victor 
Hugo. To be grouped here, also, as de- 
pendent on the critical activity of his mind 
are the poems so many in number which, 
[10] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
whether in the form of ode, elegy or son- 
net, are dedicated to the literary fame of 
those writers whom he had deeply stud- 
ied. In this large body of verse his criticism 
is condensed and, so far as the matter 
permits, is put into the form of poetry 
with a full heart of praise. He indulges 
himself in this luxury of praise, in a 
minute and lavish tribute to the writers of 
many books and plays, to the nameless as 
well as the famous dead. Swinburne truly 
is nowhere more the poet than in this in- 
exhaustible capacity to be moved to hero- 
worship and the affectionate eulogy of 
those who from Sappho and Catullus 
down the long line seem to be in the inti- 
macy of genius his own. His criticism is 
woven of such noble recognitions. 

[in 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
This literary element, explicitly exposed 
in. his prose criticism and in the critical as 
distinguished as from the imaginative 
portions of his verse, is implicitly active in 
the whole mass of his poetry. Its influence 
is observed most plainly in the structural 
form of his dramas. He had achieved such 
familiarity with past literature that his 
mind became capable of an attitude of 
contemporaneity toward it; he was thus 
led, in opposition to the usual attempt of a 
literary poet to modernize what he de- 
rives from the past and naturalize it in his 
own age, rather to archaize his own forms. 
Swinburne's detachment from his own 
time was gradual, but he moved toward a 
reproduction of both the Greek and the 
English antique. "Atalanta in Calydon" 
[12] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
was his first experiment in this way, but 
" Erechtheus, " his second Greek play, was 
more perfect in the success that it aimed 
at. Similarly his earliest dramatic work 
"The Queen Mother" and "Rosamond," 
though Shaksperian in diction and remi- 
niscence, was yet not a conscious reversion 
in art; but the play of "Locrine," and the 
trilogy of " Chastelard," "Bothwell" and 
"Mary Stuart," a chronicle history as he 
himself describes it, were attempts to write 
anew in the Elizabethan manner of the 
drama. The same may be said of "Ma- 
rino Faliero," while "The Sisters" and 
"Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards," the 
other two dramas, stand somewhat apart. 
In the trilogy of which Queen Mary is 
the theme, the effort for contemporaneity 
[13] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
with the past is also to be observed, other 
than artistically, in the historical veracity 
of the characters in themselves and of the 
scene of events. Attentive and exhaustive 
study of the facts of the record is notice- 
able, the historian's fidelity; and it is 
rather in obedience to the necessities of 
history than of art that the poet has 
swelled and lengthened the drama tp such 
a remarkable compass, and owns that 
the work has such proportions and has 
been so treated as to deserve the name of 
an epic drama. He seems desirous that it 
should be judged of as a history as well as 
in its aspect as a work of imagination. This 
indicates the depth in him of that feeling 
for past fact, which has controlled the ar- 
tistic form of the drama in his general use, 
[14] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
both Greek and English. He disengages 
himself from contemporary realities — 
standards, ideas, convictions — but sub- 
jects himself to the realities of another 
place and time so far as he can re-embody 
them ; he thus by native aptitude and with 
the aid of scholarship, does become in a 
singular degree a citizen and freeman of 
many literatures and at their different 
periods, a poet in whom what would be 
imitation and reminiscence in others be- 
comes genuine because he plays the part 
he assumes after due study and with deep 
feeling ; he thus succeeds beyond all others 
in writing literary drama that accords with 
past principles of composition. 

Such a power to free oneself from one's 
own age and move in the guise and fash- 
[15] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
ion of other times and places, illustrated 
here by the use Swinburne makes of the 
drama, involves aloofness from the world. 
He is, in fact, in his greater work of the 
imagination, remote from current life. He 
lives, withdrawn in his own thoughts, in 
that sphere of the poetic imagination 
where there is a true timelessness, — the 
solitude thronged with figures that appear 
at any moment from any age and drift 
across the vision or play their mimic parts 
before the mind's eye and disappear. It is 
the world of the great artists. Locrine, 
Erechtheus, Meleager are natural there; 
so are the stormy passion of the Scotch 
peers, the craft of English statesmen, the 
spectacle of Venetian pride ; or Sappho or 
Faustine. The world of Swinburne is well 
[16] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
symbolized by that Zodiac of the burning 
signs of love that he named in the prelude 
to "Tristram of Lyonesse, " — the signs 
of Helen, Hero, Alcyone, Iseult, Rosa- 
mond, Dido, Juliet, Cleopatra, Francesca, 
Thisbe, Angelica, Guenevere; under the 
heavens of these starry names the poet 
moves in his place apart and sees his vis- 
ions of woe and wrath and weaves his 
dream of the loves and the fates of men. 
He is a myth-lover, a dreamer, a com- 
panion of the myths and the dreams of the 
past, an artist of the imagination. The 
aloofness that belongs to Swinburne's 
verse is not due only to his effort to arch- 
aize the forms of his art, but much more 
to the fact that he reverts to great imagin- 
ative themes which, in themselves, are 
[17] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
remote from the modern world, and con- 
ceives them in a spirit of poetry that now 
seems to have its death-limit of a great 
age in his sole surviving genius. 

The artistic conservatism of Swinburne, 
which disposed him in the rigidity of his 
mind to the preservation and choice of 
anterior poetic forms, and to the treatment 
of antique and legendary themes or sub- 
jects of historic grandeur, is also felt in his 
desire that these themes should be kept in 
their primitive state. He revolted against 
moderization of the old in all its forms. 
The dramatic bent of his own genius may 
have predisposed him against idyllic treat- 
ment by any transforming method; but, 
apart from that, there was, deep in his na- 
ture, a rooted abhorrence of any change in 
[18] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
the essentials of the antique or mediaeval 
matter, a feeling reflected in his care for 
the accuracy of history in his trilogy. He 
was a purist, in opposition to his contem- 
poraries. This was exemplified, for the 
Arthur Myth, in "The Tale of Balen," 
and again in "Tristram of Lyonesse;" he 
stood for the mediaeval, romantic narra- 
tive in the one case, and for the naked 
majesty of primitive love and fate in the 
other. There is a truthfulness, an auster- 
ity of truth, in all this which is tempera- 
mental in the poet and marks the strength 
of his individuality. In a certain way there 
is the spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism in it, a 
formal reversion to severer artistic meth- 
ods, to a primitive poetry, to a more stern 
and bare figure of life, a reversion to art as 
[19] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
opposed to mere manipulation of mater- 
ial, a recognition of the truth that the great 
themes of imagination are given to man, 
not created by him in any passing genera- 
tion, that they are of man but not of men. 
This reverence of Swinburne for the past, 
in form and matter, in the things of art, is 
a part of that ritual of hero-worship to 
which he gives such fervid and personal 
expression and which is summed gener- 
ally throughout his verse in his ever re- 
curring hymn to Apollo, to the Sun-god, 
the inspiration of all poetry. The poet's 
faith is in this past of art, both form and 
matter and personality, instrument and 
theme and singer, and he sustains it 
against the temporal hour by virtue of his 
own enfranchisement in the mind from 
[20] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
time, of his own liberty in the mastery of 
many literatures and epochs, of his own 
contemporaneity with poetry in a multi- 
tude of its forms and moods. Swinburne's 
conservatism is one with his hero-worship, 
one with his scholarship, one with his life- 
long passion for literature, a poet's pas- 
sion for life in the imaginative world. The 
love of literature, a scholar's love, is the 
most fundamental thing in him ; it is a jeal- 
ous and deep-hearted love and controls 
him in his theories as well as in his prac- 
tice, in his mental outlook as well as in his 
secret inspiration ; it may make him aloof 
in person, remote in theme, reversionary in 
art, but it gives him a wide domain. The 
revolutionary cause even was for him a lit- 
erary heirloom from the poets. Swinburne 
[21] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
is a poet of culture through whom flows the 
broad stream of the many thoughts of men. 

IV 

Swinburne first took the world with mel- 
ody. The opening chorus of "Atalanta in 
Calydon" was, in the ears of men, a new 
singing voice on earth. Its music stamps 
the memory of whoever hears it beyond 
any possible oblivion. The cadence and 
the phrase are both characteristic of the 
poet's original genius, and so is their in- 
separability; they are one in the manifold 
of their syllables and they flash out in 
their fall what can only be called a colour 
of sound. This is the peculiar and arrest- 
ing poetic gift of Swinburne, the lyrical 
iridescence of the verse like a mother-of- 
[22] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
pearl sea, like a green wave breaking in 
tempest, like a rainbow-spray before the 
beak of his driving song; it is a marvel 
that changes but fails not, a witchery of 
language, a vocal incantation in the 
rhymes, an enchantment in the mere 
pour of sound and pause and elision, — a 
purely metrical gift. The chorus of the 
"Atalanta" serves melodically as a pre- 
lude to all this lyrical change, just as it 
arises most spontaneously in the memory, 
in the recall of his music. 

" When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces , 
The mother of months in meadow or plain 

Fills the shadows and windy places 

With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; 

And the brown bright nightingale amorous 

Is half assuaged for Itylus, 
[23] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces. 
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain. 

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers, 
Maiden most perfect, lady of light, 

With a noise of winds and many rivers, 
With a clamour of waters, and with might; 

Bind on thy sandals, thou most fleet. 

Over the splendour and speed of thy feet; 

For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers, 
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night. 

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her, 
Fold our hands round her knees, and cling ? 

O that man's heart were as fire and could spring 
to her, 
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring I 

For the stars and the winds are unto her 

As raiment, as songs of the harp-player; 

For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her, 
And the southwest-wind and the west-wind 
sing. 

[24] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

For winter s rains and ruins are over, 
And all the season of snows and sins; 

The days dividing lover and lover, 

The light that loses, the night that wins; 

And time remembered is grief forgotten, 

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 

And in green underwood and cover 

Blossom by blossom the spring begins. 

The full streams feed on flower of rushes, 

Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot, 
The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes 

From leaf to flower and flower to fruit; 
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire y 
And the oat is heard above the lyre, 
And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes 
The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root. 

And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, 
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid, 

Follows with dancing and fills with delight 
The Mcenad and the Bassarid; 

[25] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

And soft as lips that laugh and hide 
The laughing leaves of the tree divide, 
And screen from seeing the leave in sight 
The god pursuing, the maiden hid. 

The ivy falls with the BacchanaVs hair 

Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes; 
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare 

Her bright breast shortening into sighs; 
The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves, 
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves 
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare 
The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies." 

The lyrical vein here opened disclosed 
richer ores in the succeeding choruses and 
antiphonal arrangements of the plays. A 
new master of song-craft was plain to see. 
But there was that in the Hellenism of 
this play which gave the quality of an 
exotic to the verse, which shadowed and 
[26] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
veiled the permanence of the gift and 
made it appear more magical than real. 
Its reality and permanence as the natural 
gift of an English poet was first and sur- 
prisingly established in men's minds by 
the publication of the first series of 
"Poems and Ballads" from which Swin- 
burne's fame properly began. Here the 
lyrical quality was pre-eminent, greater in 
range and variety and in effect than in any 
later volume; here, there, were not only the 
cadence and the phrase, the flow, the 
colour of sound, the intermingling of 
musical senses with the whole range of 
emotion and thought, but such delicacy 
and litheness and volume in the verses as 
made them a new revelation of language 
as a medium of expression. It was as if a 
[27] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
new magical art had arisen, and Swin- 
burne was its master. The verse was like 
sword-play, for brilliancy and precision, 
for short and long, for speed and glitter 
and nerve. Familiarity with it has now 
lessened the pleasures of surprise and 
wonder; but as the poet has gone on 
through later years, and from time to 
time has put forth his strength in. novel 
ways, he has maintained and increased 
his early fame as a metrical master per- 
fecting a native gift with all the resources 
of an exact and subtle scholarship in the 
resources of his art, its aims and limits, as 
a form of music in words. In all these 
things he is accomplished. 
t Perfect, however, in metres, he is less 
sensitive to purity in structural form. His 
[28] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
lyrics are apt to be shortened dramas, his 
dramas to be fragmentary epics, his nar- 
rative to be a blend of lyric passion and 
dramatic episode. "Tristram of Lyon- 
esse" is his most characteristic poem in 
this respect as in all others ; it is the poem 
most representative of his qualities, each 
at its best. The poet's command of intel- 
lectual form, of the proportion of matter 
to expression, of the economic rendering 
of character, event and thought, of that 
logical condensation which is effected by 
art, is less manifest. Form in all its modes, 
and they are numerous, is essential to the 
greatest poetry. Swinburne is eminent for 
metrical form, in the highest degree; and 
in this he is lyrically unrivalled, so far as 
the form only is concerned. Of form in its 
[29] 



GERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
structural and intellectual modes he has 
less, but prefers complexity to singleness 
and an ample fullness to economy. Blank 
verse also does not take his imprint so 
sympathetically as the lyrical measures, 
though as studiously laboured as his rhym- 
ed and lyric lines; it is rather by the mel- 
ody with which he first captured men, and 
by no other equal bond, that he holds the 
world under the fascination of liquid ca- 
dences and light lilts and choral harmonies 
that first fell on human speech from his lips. 

V 

The second salient trait of Swinburne's 
work, and one not less impressive and 
individualistic than his lyricism, is its ren- 
dering of the experience of passion. The 
[30] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
theme is most pervasive in his earlier 
verse, and is there so frequent and takes 
on so many forms of imagination that a 
misleading idea was fixed in the public 
mind of the narrowness of his range in 
poetry. The poetic fiction under which he 
develops the theme is multifold, and ex- 
hibits the various sources of his culture ; it 
has three main phases, classical, mediae- 
val and Pre-Raphaelite. The guise of Pre- 
Raphaelitism is the earliest and most pal- 
pable in the verse, and the fact is con- 
nected with the poet's association in life 
with the group of artists, Rossetti, Morris, 
Burne- Jones and others, with whom he 
had come in contact in college days and 
later, and to whose art in painting and 
cast of imagination generally Swinburne's 
[31] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
was most cognate. His mind formed the 
habit of allegorizing in human figures ab- 
stractions, such as Love, Fear, Grief, and 
presenting these pictorially and symbolic- 
ally. They are figures essentially without 
the motion of life, designated by attributes 
of colour and wreath and wand, can- 
vases or cameos in words; the poems in 
which they are the human element of in- 
terest are also highly conventionalized in 
their literary art, generally under French 
or Italian influences. Such are the open- 
ing poems of his work, set first in the col- 
lected edition, "A Ballad of Life" and "A 
Ballad of Death." The initial note thus 
struck often recurs, but as an artistic meth- 
od it is diminishingly employed by the poet 
in the progress of his works. The classical 
[32] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
source of his song is a much deeper spring, 
and from the moment when it blends 
with the verse lifts it far away from sesthet- 
icism, conventionalized art and any lim- 
itation of narrow modes, peculiar fashion 
and formalism. The theme at once takes 
its great form as that of the everlasting 
opposition inhuman nature which is histor- 
ically summed up as the antithesis of class- 
ical paganism to monkish Christianity, 
or more broadly as the contrast of the bod- 
ily with the spiritual element in life. Swin- 
burne still farther defines the discord as 
the opposition of the worship of Venus to 
that of the Virgin Mary ; and thus begins 
for him that denial of Christian symbol- 
ism which he carried to the extreme of ex- 
pression in the poem " Before a Crucifix. " 
[33] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
The reversionary instinct, so notice- 
able in all his art, is here at work un- 
checked. He seems, like another Julian, to 
bring back the worship of the Greek di- 
vinities, affirming their permanence es- 
sentially in human nature, and he takes 
the traditionary dying words of Julian as 
the motto, one may add the motif, of 
the poem in which he most eloquently 
set forth his new paganism, the Hymn to 
Proserpine : 

" O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped 

out in a day I 
From your wrath is the world released, redeemed 

from your chains, men say. 
New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers 

have broken your rods ; 
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young 

compassionate Gods. 

[34] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

But for me their new device is barren, the days 

are bare ; 
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten 

that were. 
Time and the Gods are at strife ; ye dwell in the 

midst thereof. 
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of 

love. 
I say to you, cease, take rest ; yea, I say to you 

all, be at peace, 
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren 

bosom shall cease. 
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou 

shalt not take, 
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts 

of the nymphs in the brake ; 
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with 

tenderer breath ; 
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy 

before death ; 
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre, 
[35] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings 

that flicker like fire. 
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer 

than all these things ? 
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. 
A little while and we die ; shall life not thrive as 

it may ? 
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving 

his day. 
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath 

enough of his tears : 
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to 

blacken his years ? 
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean ; the world 

has grown grey from thy breath ; 
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on 

the fulness of death. 
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for 

a day ; 
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel 

outlives not May. 

[36] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Sleep, shall we sleep after all ? for the world is 

not sweet in the end ; 
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years 

ruin and rend. 
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock 

that abides ; 
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her 

face with the foam of the tides. 
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings 

of racks and rods I 

ghastly stories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted gods 
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, 

and all knees bend, 

1 kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look 

to the end, 
************** 

Though the feet of thine high priests tread where 
thy lords and our forefathers trod, 

Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou 
being dead art a God, 

[37] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Though before thee the throned Cytherean be 

fallen, and hidden her head, 
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead 

shall go down to thee dead. 
Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess 

with grace clad around ; 
Thou art throned where another was king ; 

where another was queen she is crowned. 
Yea, once we had sight of another : but now she 

is queen, say these. 
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blos- 
som of flowering seas, 
Clothed round with the world's desire as with 

raiment as fair as the foam, 
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess and 

mother of Rome. 
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to 

sorrow ; but ours, 
Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and 

colour of flowers, 

[38] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

White rose of the rose-white water , a silver splen- 
dour, a flame, 

Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth 
grew sweet with her name. 

For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, 
and rejected ; but she 

Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and 
imperial, her foot on the sea. 

And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds 
and the viewless ways, 

And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea- 
blue stream of the bays." 

The essential elements of Swinburne's 
imagination and method are all here pres- 
ent in this delineation of opposed divini- 
ties each powerful over human life. The 
identical theme is set forth again under 
the guise of mediaeval fiction in the poem 
"Laus Veneris,' ' where the knight of the 
[39] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
Venusberg legend sets in antithesis the 
pagan and the Christian scheme of life, 
and embodies in himself the apostacy 
from Christian ideals — 

" For I was of Christ's choosing, I God's knight, — " 
and his adhesion to the lady of the myth; 

" For till the thunder in the trumpet be, 
Soul may divide from body, but not we 

One from another ; I hold thee with my hand, 
I let mine eyes have all their will of thee. " 

Apart from the theory and the imagery, 
these poems are also identical in the tone 
of sad, dark farewell which converts each 
of them into a lament for love, for life 
itself. The protagonist of either poem has 
finished with life. Both poems have the 
motion of life, a vital breath in their lyrical 
[40] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
expression of emotion profoundly modi- 
fied by thought; but about the imagery, 
the figures of Aphrodite, the Virgin, the 
Lady of the Venusberg, and also the Cru- 
cifix that defines the conception of Christ 
in "Laus Veneris, " — about all these 
there lingers the Pre-Raphselite habit of 
imagination; the imagery has more affin- 
ity with modes of sacerdotal art, with 
symbolism and the attributive in imagin- 
ative power than it has with the free vital- 
ity that is more properly the sphere of 
poetry. 

The new paganism, of which these two 
poems are elemental expressions receives a 
widely varied illustration in the body of 
poetry that is grouped about them. Several 
of these are dramatic lyrics containing a 
[41] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
situation or a slight story; others are 
hardly more than exercises in verse, often 
in French forms; still others are deeply 
meditated or elaborately studied after the 
sentiment, the phrasing and the thought- 
movement of the Greek antique. The 
whole spirit, however, is romantic in mood 
and conduct and more nigh to the essen- 
tially mediaeval than to the modern or to 
the ancient. The dominant memories of 
Swinburne, however, whether intellec- 
tual or imaginative, lie in classical anti- 
quity; and, so far as he has need of any 
divine principle in his verse, in concrete 
forms, he has found approach to the Greek 
gods most facile. He achieves the most 
genuine appearance of belief in the gods 
that has fallen to the fortune of any Eng- 
[42] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
lish poet, perhaps of any poet in any 
modern literature. The recurring hymn to 
the Sun, under its many forms, which has 
already been alluded to, is a deep note of 
his temperament. The classical immer- 
sion of his mind had made clean work of 
all Christian symbolism; it had swept it 
away ; and in its place came, for imagina- 
tive purposes, the Greek forms of old di- 
vinity and myth, but less as idols of hope 
than idols of memory. The close of the 
"Hymn to Proserpine" gives his point 
of faith with most precision ; death is the 
end of all, but he chooses for his com- 
panions in death the dead gods, — he 
will descend to Proserpine where all have 
gone. His faith is a farewell; a Vale not 
an Ave. 

[43] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
The new paganism in which imagina- 
tive reminiscence plays so great a part, 
effecting this renascence of antique sym- 
bolism in the poet's mind, also finds ex- 
pression in a more direct and concrete 
presentation of the experience as well as of 
the theory of passion, both in the form of 
dramatic incident or situation and in the 
form of allegorized figuration in art. 
Whether set forth under a classical or later 
name, Sappho or Faustine or Felise, or 
in the namelessness of a dream of pas- 
sion, Swinburne delineates the moment 
with vividness of sensation, with languid 
hazes, with lights and shadows as of some 
Venetian picture; or in his symbolical 
poems he builds up a figure, a background, 
a landscape as of some mythic painting, 
[44] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
though using mainly cadence as his means 
of evoking it. "Dolores" is a poem of this 
last type, and characteristic of his genius, 
in subject, handling and tone. In all these 
poems which, in various ways, by dramat- 
ic, lyric and meditative modes, set forth 
the theme of the mortal ways of desire, the 
accompaniment of the verse is a lament, 
seldom light, usually profound and often 
touched with bitterness. Pain is the 
master-emotion in the verse, unconcealed, 
rebellious, self-pitying. The knight of the 
"Laus Veneris" is filled full of it; so are 
the cadences of "Dolores;" so are some 
of the lightest and most delicate of the 
lyrics. 

The poem which sets forth this as- 
pect of the paganism of a modern spirit 
[45] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
with nobleness of feeling is "Hesperia," 
which after its fine nature-opening, goes 
on with its human burden in these lines : 

" From the bountiful infinite west, from the happy 
memorial places 
Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight 
of the dead, 
Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light 
of ineffable faces, 
And the sound of a sea without wind is about 
them, and sunset is red, 
Come back to redeem and release me from, love 
that recalls and represses, 
That cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the ser- 
pent has eaten his fill ; 
From the bitter delights of the dark, and the 
feverish, the furtive caresses 
That murder the youth in a man or ever his 
heart have its will. 

[46] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Thy lips cannot laugh and thine eyes cannot 
weep ; thou art pale as a rose is, 
Paler and sweeter than leaves that cover the 
blush of the bud ; 
And the heart of the flower is compassion, and 
pity the core it encloses, 
Pity, not love, that is born of the breath and 
decays with the blood. 
As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge 
of it bruises her bosom, 
So love wounds as we grasp it, and blackens and 
burns as a flame ; 
I have loved overmuch in my life; when 
the live bud bursts with the blossom, 
Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine 
thereof shame. 
As a heart that its anguish divides is the green 
bud cloven asunder ; 
As the blood of a man self -slain is the flush of 
the leaves that allure ; 

[47] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

And the perfume as poison and wine to the brain, 
a delight and a wonder ; 
And the thorns are too sharp for a boy, too slight 
for a man to endure, 
Too soon did I love it, and lost love's rose ; and 
I cared not for glory's ; 
Only the blossoms of sleep and of pleasure were 
mixed in my hair. 
Was it myrtle or poppy thy garland was woven 
with, O my Dolores ? 
Was it pallor of slumber, or blush as of blood, 
that I found in thee fair ? 
For desire is a respite from love, and the flesh 
not the heart is her fuel ; 
She was sweet to me once, who am fled 
and escaped from the range of her 
reign ; 
Who behold as of old time at hand as I turn, 
with her mouth growing cruel, 
And flushed as with wine with the blood of her 
lovers, Our Lady of Pain. 

[48] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Low down where the thicket is thicker with thorns 
than with leaves in the summer, 
In the brake is a gleaming of eyes and a hissing 
of tongues that I knew ; 
And the lithe long throats of her snakes reach 
round her, their mouths overcome her, 
And her lips grow cool with their foam, made 
moist as a desert with dew. 
With the thirst and the hunger of lust though 
her beautiful lips be so bitter, 
With the cold foul foam of the snakes they soften 
and redden and smile ; 
And her fierce mouth sweetens, her eyes wax 
wide and her eyelashes glitter, 
And she laughs with a savour of blood in her 
face, and a savour of guile. 
She laughs, and her hands reach hither, her hair 
blows hither and hisses, 
As a lowlit flame in a wind, back-blown till it 
shudder and leap ; 

[49] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Let her lips not again lay hold on my soul, nor 
her poisonous kisses, 
To consume it alive and divide from thy bosom. 
Our Lady of Sleep. 
Ah daughter of sunset and slumber, if now it 
return into prison, 
Who shall redeem it anew ? But we, if thou wilt, 
let us fly ; 
Let us take to us, now that the white skies thrill 
with a moon unarisen, 
Swift horses of fear or of love, take flight and 
depart and not die. 
They are swifter than dreams, they are stronger 
than death ; there is none that hath rid- 
den, 
None that shall ride in the dim strange ways of 
his life as we ride ; 
By the meadows of memory, the highlands of hope, 
and the shore that is hidden, 
Where life breaks loud and unseen, a sonorous 
invisible tide ; 

[50] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

By the sands where sorrow has trodden, the salt 
pools bitter and sterile, 
By the thundering reef and the low sea-wall and 
the channel of years. 
Our wild steeds press on the night, strain hard 
through pleasure and peril, 
Labour and listen and pant not or pause for the 
peril that nears ; 
And the sound of them trampling the way 
cleaves night as an arrow asunder, 
And slow by the sand-hill and swift by the 
down with its glimpses of grass, 
Sudden and steady the music, as eight hoofs 
trample and thunder, 
Rings in the ear of the low blind wind of the 
night as we pass ; 
Shrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that 
was mute as a maiden, 
Stung into storm by the speed of our passage, 
and deaf where we past ; 

[51] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

And our spirits too burn as we bound, thine holy 
but mine heavy-laden, 
As we burn with the fire of our flight ; ah love, 
shall we win at the last ? " 

The procession of Swinburne's studies 
of passion, highly composite in artistic ma- 
terial and method as they are and diversi- 
fied by their kinship with many moods and 
periods of the spirit of poetry, have, to- 
gether with their vividness of sensation 
and their sad meditative burden of the 
emptiness of mortal things, a monotone 
that is unmistakable, as omnipresent and 
profound as the monotone in his revolu- 
tionary verses. It is the monotone of fun- 
damental emotion in the one as in the 
other, and springs from a depth of habit- 
ual feeling that is a part of the poet's tern- 
[52] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
perament. The experience of passion is not 
seized dramatically in the true sense, it is 
seized lyrically, and the ultimate mood is 
that of the weariness of life which in place 
of a dramatic exhaustion of the action in 
tragic catastrophe, issues only in an ex- 
hausted emotion; it belongs to the type 
that it should end in weakness. The 
end of the feeling is a transformation 
into thought; into meditation; in this 
intellectual climax the mood takes on the 
appearance of philosophy, of a surrender 
of life to death, of the prayer to Proser- 
pine before the descent of the poet to the 
shades of the under-world. This philos- 
ophy in which the lyrical mood of Swin- 
burne under these impulses evaporates is 
most beautifully and winningly given in 
[53] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
the verses so well known by their melody 
alone, "The Garden of Proserpine." 
They contain the summary of his verse of 
life-experience for the individual, of emo- 
tional experience properly, and are the 
death-song of the pagan ideal, not in its 
historic but its aesthetic sense, as it was 
conceived and presented by him : 

" Here, where the world is quiet, 

Here, where all trouble seems 
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot 

In doubtful dreams of dreams ; 
I watch the green field growing 
For reaping folk and sowing, 
For harvest-time and mowing, 

A sleepy world of streams. 

I am tired of tears and laughter, 
And men that laugh and weep, 

[54] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Of what may come hereafter 

For men that sow to reap : 
I am weary of days and hours, 
Blown buds of barren flowers. 
Desires and dreams and powers 

And everything but sleep. 

Here life has death for neighbour, 

And far from eye or ear 
Wan waves and wet winds labour, 

Weak ships and spirits steer ; 
They drive adrift, and whither 
They wot not who make thither ; 
But no such winds blow hither ; 

And no such things grow here. 

No growth of moor or coppice, 

No heather-flower or vine, 
But bloomless buds of poppies, 

Green grapes of Proserpine, 
Pale beds of blowing rushes 
Where no leaf blooms or blushes 

[55] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Save this whereout she crushes 
For dead men deadly wine. 

Pale, without name or number, 

In fruitless fields of corn, 
They bow themselves and slumber 

All night till light is born ; 
And like a soul belated, 
In hell and heaven unmated, 
By cloud and mist abated 

Comes out of darkness morn. 

Though one were strong as seven, 
He too with death shall dwell, 

Nor wake with wings in heaven, 
Nor weep for pains in hell ; 

Though one were fair as roses, 

His beauty clouds and closes ; 

And well though love reposes, 
In the end it is not well. 

Pale, beyond porch and portal, 

Crowned with calm leaves, she stands 

[56] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Who gathers all things mortal 

With cold immortal hands ; 
Her languid lips are sweeter 
Than love's who fears to greet her 
To men that mix and meet her 

From many times and lands. 

She waits for each and other , 
She waits for all men born ; 

Forgets the earth her mother, 
The life of fruits and corn ; 

And spring and seed and swallow 

Take wing for her and follow 

Where summer song rings hollow 
And flowers are put to scorn. 

There go the loves that wither, 

The old loves with wearier wings ; 

And all dead years draw thither, 
And all disastrous things ; 

Dead dreams of days forsaken, 

Blind buds that snows have shaken, 

[57] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Wild leaves that winds have taken, 
Red strays of ruined springs. 

We are not sure of sorrow. 

And joy was never sure ; 
To-day will die to-morrow ; 

Time stoops to no man y s lure ; 
And love, grown faint and fretful 
With lips but half regretful 
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful 

Weeps that no loves endure. 

From too much love of living, 
From hope and fear set free, 

We thank with brief thanksgiving 
Whatever gods may be 

That no life lives for ever ; 

That dead men rise up never ; 

That even the weariest river 
Winds somewhere safe to sea. 

Then star nor sun shall waken, 
Nor any change of light : 

[58] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Nor sound of waters shaken, 

Nor any sound or sight : 
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal 
Nor days nor things diurnal, 
Only the sleep eternal 

In an eternal night.* 9 

In his later work the theme of passion 
was less brilliantly treated than in these 
first poems, and few of the passages in 
which he reverts to the subject are so sig- 
nificant, characteristic or successful. Pas- 
sion as an element in human life attracted 
him rather in more dramatic ways, as it 
exists in the great trilogy of Queen Mary 
felt in diverse modes by those about the 
Queen from the tender and noble figure 
of Chastelard to the weakness of Darnley 
and the strength of Bothwell; or it at- 
[59] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
tracted him as the life-element of the myth 
of Tristram and Iseult, that in which they 
had the perfection of their being and the 
completion of their fate. In both cases 
this is the drama of passion, not its lyric- 
ism; and in both cases, too, it is divorced 
from the after-sickliness of thought that 
attends it in the youthful poems, and is 
free from the envelopment of the- pagan 
world, from dead gods and past time; it 
stands by itself, in its own right, a part of 
nature and life universal, a reality. No 
English poem surpasses "Tristram of 
Lyonesse" in the quality of passion; it is 
great as a representation of passion, pri- 
marily, and equal to the fame of its theme. 
Yet it is rather upon the younger verse, in 
the early passionate efflorescence of his 
[60] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
poetic nature, that the fame of Swinburne 
as an original, unique and powerful expo- 
nent of the passion of life in the ways of 
desire, brilliantly illustrating the multi- 
form romantic spirit, must rest. 

VI 

The meditative power of Swinburne's 
mind gradually displaced the passionate 
impulse of the senses, in his verse. He is a 
very thoughtful poet. The intellectual 
burden of his poetry first appeared in the 
vigour with which he seized and held to the 
idea of fate; fate is as elemental in his 
work as passion and is its true comple- 
ment. The conception at the beginning 
may have been only a part of his Greek 
legacy, made familiar to him in his study 
[61] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
of Greek drama and adopted from it into 
his own literary scheme of art and phil- 
osophy of life. In " Atalanta of Calydon", 
fate is set forth in the choruses ; it is associ- 
ated there with the feeling of bitter hos- 
tility to the gods. There is a Lucretian 
sternness and fierceness in all of Swin- 
burne's invective against those aspects of 
religion which were to him what supersti- 
tion was to the old Roman; and he uses 
violence of phrase in the expression of his 
mood. It is thus that he comes to a climax 
of thought in the attack on the supernal 
powers which ends in the words, "the 
supreme evil, God." The thought is 
arrived at through the spectacle of the 
suffering of the human race, and applies, 
as it were, to the Zeus of Prometheus. 
[62] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

" Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men; 

Thou hast marred one face with fire of many tears; 
Thou hast taken love, and given us sorrow again; 

With pain thou hast filled us full to the eyes 
and ears. 
Therefore because thou art strong, our father, and we 

Feeble ; and thou art against us, and thine hand 
Constrains us in the shallows of the sea 

And breaks us at the limits of the land ; 
Because thou hast bent thy lightnings as a bow, 

And loosed the hours like arrows ; and let fall 
Sins and wild words and many a wingM woe 

And wars among us, and one end of all ; 
Because thou hast made the thunder, and thy feet 

Are as a rushing water when the skies 
Break, and thy face as an exceeding heat 

And flames of fire the eyelids of thine eyes ; 
Because thou art over all who are over us ; 

Because thy name is life and our name death ; 
Because thou art cruel and men are piteous, 

And our hands labour and thine hand scatter eth ; 

[63] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Lo, with hearts rent and knees made tremulous, 
Lo, with ephemeral lips and casual breathy 
At least we witness of thee ere we die 
That these things are not otherwise, but thus ; 
That each man in his heart sigheth, and saith, 
That all men even as I, 
All we are against thee, against thee, O God most 
high:' 

In such passages, of which this was the 
earliest, the life-weariness that belongs to 
exhausted passion is extended over the 
whole of life, and the philosophy set forth 
is frankly atheistic. The passing away of 
the successive hierarchies of gods that 
have been exalted in the heavens, includ- 
ing the entire symbolism of Christianity, 
is as constant a theme of Swinburne's im- 
agination and meditation as is the transi- 
[64] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
toriness of the generations of men and 
their works ; nor is there only this denial of 
the gods, but with it goes that implacable 
hostility to them and their ways, which 
has been alluded to, giving often to the 
verse an edge of scorn and hate. Swin- 
burne derived from Greek literature the 
point of view, so far as the history of man 
under the Olympian dispensation was 
concerned; he derived from the revolu- 
tionary poets an attitude toward histori- 
cal Christianity in its mediaeval forms and 
in its institutional power, which was a 
practical repetition of the same point of 
view; however he approached super- 
natural religion he collided with the eter- 
nal mystery of God's dealing with man- 
kind, and also with the temporal dis- 
[65] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
pensation of the professional ministers of 
God, the priesthood wherever found. 
The anti- Christian verse is, of course, in- 
cidental to and a part of the great mass of 
revolutionary verse, and belongs to the 
poet's crusade against the social powers 
that be, to his ranking himself with the 
spirit of Burns and the later upholders of 
the powers of light, that is of human in- 
tellect, liberty and love. But, besides this 
aspect of it, there is a philosophical side to 
his thought, apart from its revolutionary 
intention, by virtue of which it must be re- 
garded abstractly as his own poetic atti- 
tude to the mystery of life itself. Fate is the 
simplest word to describe the power in 
whose dark and infinite grasp Swin- 
burne habitually sees the universe of man. 
[66] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
Deeply impressed as the poet is by the 
conception of fate in life and in the uni- 
verse, he does not embody it in either his 
dramas or his dramatic narrative with 
great power; he rather describes it than 
presents its operation; it is a presence 
rather than a force in his verse. The story 
of Atalanta, and also that of Erechtheus 
contain fate, in piteous and cruel forms, but 
the will of the gods in either case seems 
arbitrary rather than fatal. In the Trilogy 
of Queen Mary the element of fate is dis- 
cernible in the constant reminiscence, 
though the play, of Chastelard's execu- 
tion and in Mary Beaton who is the em- 
bodiment of that memory and shall re- 
main with the Queen until the latter' s 
death at the block expiates the original 
[67] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
wrong, or at least crowns it as a consumma- 
tion; but the linking of fate which should 
connect one with the other directly and 
impressively, and as a law of necessity is 
not shown. In the other dramas there is a 
similar laxity in the causal operation of 
fate, — the fatal necessity of the action is 
not felt as power, but is described as 
story. In "Tristram of Lyonesse," it is 
the passion, not the fate of the lovers' love 
that is in the foreground of interest. In the 
shorter poems the method of presenting 
the general subject-matter is more ab- 
stract and by means of passages of in- 
vective. " Anactoria" is the best example, 
where the outcry against the divine power 
is repeatedly raised, with a fierce vin- 
dictiveness : 

[68] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
" 7* not his incense bitterness, his meat 
Murder ? his hidden face and iron feet 
Hath not man known, and felt them on their way 
Threaten and trample all things and every day ? 
Hath he not sent us hunger ? who hath cursed 
Spirit and flesh with longing ? filled with thirst 
Their lips who cried unto him ? who bade exceed 
The fervid will, fall short the feeble deed, 
Bade sink the spirit and the flesh aspire, 
Pain animate the dust of dead desire, 
And life yield up her flower to violent fate ? 
Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate, 
Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath, 
And mix his immortality with death." 

At the conclusion of this poem is the first 
expression of any possible human victory 
in the strife with the gods. It takes form in 
the thought that, whatever misfortune 
may be visited upon Sappho in life, yet 
after death she will have an immortality in 
[69] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
her words still breathing on the lips of 

"Albeit I die indeed 
And hide myself and sleep and no man heed, 
Of me the high God hath not all his will. 
Blossom of branches, and on each high hill 
Clear air and wind, and under in clamorous vales 
Fierce noises of the fiery nightingales, 
Buds burning in the sudden spring like fire, 
The wan washed sand and the waves* vain desire, 
Sails seen like blown white flowers at sea, and 

words 
That bring tears swiftest, and long notes of birds 
Violently singing till the whole world sings — 
J Sappho, shall be one with all these things, 
With all high things for ever ; and my face 
Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place, 
Cleave to men's lives, and waste the days thereof 
With gladness and much sadness and long love." 

This hope of immortality in the mind and 

for the service of man is the prelude to 

[70] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
Swinburne's later exposition of man's 
faith in himself. 

The earlier attitude of hostility to the 
gods yields in the poet's maturer years to a 
prevailing mood of high-spirited indif- 
ference, which is felt rather toward fate 
under the forms of the imagery of nature 
than under those of divine beings. The 
passage which best concentrates it is the 
speech of Tristram, concerning fate which 
is described only by negatives as the un- 
known infinite in the universe : 

" How should it turn from its great way to give 
Man that must die a clearer space to live f 
Why should the waters of the sea be cleft, 
The hills be molten to his right and left, 
That he from deep to deep might pass dry-shod 
Or look between the viewless heights on God ? 
Hath he such eyes as, when the shadows flee, 

[71] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

The sun looks out with to salute the sea ? 
Is his hand bounteous as the morning's hand ? 
Or where the night stands hath he feet to stand ? 
Will the storm cry not when he bids it cease ? 
Is it his voice that saith to the east wind, Peace ? 
Is his breath mightier than the west wind's 

breath ? 
Both his heart know the things of life and death ? 
Can his face bring forth sunshine and give rain, 
Or his weak will that dies and lives again 
Make one thing certain or bind one thing fast, 
That, as he willed, it shall be at the last ? 
How should the storms of heaven and kindled 

lights 
And all the depths of things and topless heights 
And air and earth and fire and water change 
Their likeness, and the natural world grow strange, 
And all the limits of their life undone 
Lose count of time and conscience of the sun, 
And that fall under which was fixed above, 
That man might have a larger hour for love?" 

[72] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
It is in this identification of fate with the 
universe of greater being, in a form of ap- 
prehension which hovers between pan- 
theism in its aspect of nature-force and in 
its aspect of humanity, that Swinburne's 
mind rests in its final meditation. The 
hymn entitled "Hertha" sets forth the 
matter in full and at great length, with a 
principal dependence in the imagery on 
Igdrasil, the tree of life. In its main phil- 
osophic intention the poem is hardly to be 
distinguished from Emerson's "Brahma", 
which is the type of such poetic thought; 
but Swinburne gives it a new turn and 
transforms its meaning by grafting into it 
the idea that mankind is the highest per- 
sonification of the divine known to man 
and hence that true worship and religion 
[73] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
is in the energy of man's self-expression, 
in the apotheosis of himself that is self- 
achieved. The key stanza is this: 

" A creed is a rod, 

And a crown is of night ; 
But this thing is God, 

To be man with thy might, 
To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and 
live out thy life as the light." 

The poem in its last line makes the identifi- 
cation of man with the infinite spirit plain : 

" Man, equal and one with me, man that is made 
of me, man that is I" 

The same doctrine is more elaborately 
stated and with a more comprehensive in- 
clusion of many past elements of Swin- 
burne's thought, especially with relation 
to the passing away of the gods and to the 
[74] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
history of superstition, in the " Hymn of 
Man," which Swinburne himself de- 
scribes as "the birth-song of spiritual 
renascence" and which concludes its 
Miriam-like outburst of triumph over the 
fall of old religion with the exultant cry : 

" Glory to man in the highest 1 for Man is the 
master of things." 

This is the French apotheosis of Reason in 
its most modern form, and may be regard- 
ed, perhaps, as essentially a hymn of posi- 
tivism. 

It thus appears that Swinburne's mind, 
guided by the preconceptions of his Greek 
studies and the revolutionary impetus of 
his native genius, has been deeply con- 
cerned with reaching an intellectual faith 
[75] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
with regard to the scheme of man's life as 
it has been seen by him in history. In this 
attempt he has clung most tenaciously to 
the idea of fate, a vague conception di- 
versely seized by his mind and set forth in 
a variety of ways. The denial of the gods 
was inherent in his intellectual position; 
and the gods having passed away, there 
remained only such an adjustment of 
mind to the world emptied of old divinity 
as is possible to many a modern brooder 
over thought besides the poet himself who 
may be, somewhat at least, a type of such 
sceptical men. On the one hand there was 
the resource of the conception of the un- 
known infinite which is approached by 
human thought most commonly through 
the majestic phenomena of nature, and of 
[76] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
which the nature-poetry of the book of 
Job, whence come the imaginative method 
and scriptural cadences of that speech of 
Tristram that has been quoted, is the 
ritual of expression. On the other hand 
there was the resource of positivistic and 
humanitarian insistence on the religion of 
Humanity, the creed of doing as the other 
is the creed of knowing. The apotheosis of 
human energy is natural in any greatly 
progressive or violently active age of the 
world ; and in the nineteenth century, with 
its unmeasured pride in itself and its in- 
contestable greatness of achievement in 
both the realms of knowledge and action, 
faith in man sprang up and has flourished 
as if it were the ancient Igdrasil itself; it 
has seemed as if man were a god of nature 
[77] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
and a providence for the future, — at 
least that has been the tendency of man's 
late ideals in science and philanthropy. 
Man at least thinks himself — what Swin- 
burne says the gods were not — piteous. 
Swinburne has caught the infection of both 
of these intellectual moods ; he has on one 
hand accepted imaginatively the theory of 
the unknown natural infinite and on the 
other the doctrine of the greatness — as he 
frankly says, the godhead — of man; not, it 
should be observed , of men in their parcelled 
and particular individuality, but of the race, 
— the apotheosis is a thing of collectivity, 
and without such collectivity would not ex- 
ist. Perhaps his own words should be given : 

" We men, the multiform features of man, what- 
soever we be 

[78] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Recreate him of whom we are creatures, and all we 

only are he. 
For each man of all men is God, but God is the 

fruit of the whole; 
Indivisible spirit and blood, indiscernible body 

from soul. 
Not men's but man's is the glory of godhead, — " 

In working out this side of the theory, it 
follows of necessity that the poet should 
find himself in a midmost ethical stream, 
that he should end less as a philosopher 
than as a moralist; he would finally be ab- 
sorbed in the vindication of that law of 
life which is humanly discerned and ap- 
plied as the will of "righteousness" from 
age to age. The gods pass like leaves of the 
forest, in their generations, even as men 
do; but righteousness is an abiding thing. 
It is this that is stated, very nobly and 
[79] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
magnificently indeed, in the chief poem of 
Swinburne's later years, "The Altar of 
Righteousness." This poem is the climax 
of his intellectual attempt in solving the 
universe, or in reaching at least a working 
relation with respect to it; it is the ulti- 
mate conviction, the last word, — this of 
the majestic permanence of righteousness. 
Does it seem singular to any that the 
poet of passion should be one with the 
poet of righteousness ? There is really no 
discord in the case; the two elements, at 
least, never cross in the verse. A poet gives 
a representation of life, and the variety of 
his representation depends on the richness 
and complexity of his nature. Swinburne 
was endowed with power to render with 
unrivalled vividness, with brilliance of 
[80] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
word and melody of cadence the exper- 
ience of man's life in passion; he was also 
endowed with intellectual curiosity and 
restlessness, with mental vigour, with ir- 
repressible and inexhaustible sympathies 
with the public causes of mankind in po- 
litical and religious social life, and he had 
thence his power to interest himself in the 
ideas that lie back of all life, in the phil- 
osophy of the divine element appearing in 
the history of the race and in its changes 
under the shaping of time from Greek to 
Christian, and so on to the last results of 
modern speculation. He expressed himself 
from year to year, according to the faith 
that was in him, and he reached in his 
maturity the clear position which needs no 
plainer definition than his own lines con- 
[81] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
tain. The original idea of adverse fate has 
faded in his mind, it would appear, to that 
of the immanence of the unknown in na- 
ture, indifferent and kindless to man, but 
not consciously cruel and deliberately 
scornful like the old gods ; and this in turn 
yields to the prominence in his later 
thought of the essential necessity that 
mankind is under to know no god except his 
own spirit, to advance that spirit as the life 
of the race itself, and to find the conscious 
law of righteousness in its bosom age after 
age its only oracle and guide to destiny. 

VII 

The third great monochord of Swin- 
burne's verse, after passion and fate, is 
nature. The poet's genius is one of singu- 
[82] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
lar directness, though the fact is maskea 
and obscured by the conventionalized, 
curious and classically reminiscent char- 
acter that so much of his work super- 
ficially bears. The same directness that 
appears in his dealing with the experience 
of passion, and with the theory of the di- 
vine element in the universe, marks also 
his treatment of nature. He is a nature- 
poet, but rather in the energetic than the 
aesthetic sense. The reminiscence of his 
boyhood upbringing by the seas of the 
Northumberland coast and of the Isle of 
Wight is always present in his verse of 
every kind. His description is not deficient 
in either abundance or beauty of detail; 
but he seizes the landscape mainly as a 
whole, he feels the forces abiding in it as 
[83] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
power, he is exalted by its effluence in him 
as an emotion; in a word, his treatment is 
ample. Here, too, that extraordinary 
trait of primitiveness, that love of the 
primordial things in thought and life, of 
which much illustration has already been 
afforded in the preceding pages, breaks 
out with great force. It seems often that 
his mind is absorbed, not so much in nat- 
ural objects in their individuality as in 
natural elements, in their larger life of the 
constitution, the whirl, the vast spec- 
tacle of nature. Fire, air, earth and water 
are the four elements from which his very 
vocabulary seems made up; flame, wind 
and foam, and all the forms of light are so 
much a part of his colour- rhythm that they 
become an opaline of verse peculiarly his 
[84] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
own ; his mannerism in diction and style is 
chiefly a thing of his fascination with 
these elemental phases of matter and sen- 
sation which are more abstractions of 
motion, hue and luminousness than simple 
objects of sight and hearing. The blurring 
effect of this mass of indefinable sensation, 
especially when metaphorically employed, 
even more than the overcharge of vocal 
sound in the verse, accounts for that im- 
pression of vacuity of meaning that Swin- 
burne's poetry in general makes on read- 
ers not habituated to his manner. The 
main fact is that in the sphere of natural 
imagery his mind tends constantly to es- 
cape from the limited and particular ob- 
ject into the more abstract primary ele- 
ments of nature, and to use these meta- 
[85] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
phorically without definition to colour his 
verse with sensation that is rather emo- 
tional than perceptive; it is thus that he 
produces these effects by virtue of which 
his poetry is generally thought to have 
more affinity with the art of music than 
has been achieved by other poets. Colour- 
tones of nature have as much to do with 
this as simple sound-tones of rhyme, al- 
literation and cadence ; all the senses, and 
not the ear alone, are occupied with this 
music which lulls and dazzles the mind 
with a magical and exquisite pleasure. 

The nature poems of Swinburne in the 
precise sense, however, are many and 
various and among them some rise higher 
than others. He has himself, in his own re- 
view of his poetic work, named those which 
[86] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
to himself seem most significant, and his 
own choice coincides with that of his read- 
ers. He dwells there upon his closeness 
to the scene and repeats the same traits 
of the general landscape that he has de- 
scribed in verse. No summary can equal 
this in justice, brevity and breadth. The 
poems he selects are the four poems of the 
West Undercliff, "In the Bay," "On the 
Cliffs," " A Forsaken Garden," the dedica- 
tion to "The Sisters," "Off Shore," "An 
Autumn Vision, " " A Swimmer's Dream," 
"On the South Coast," "Neap-Tide." It 
will be found on examination that primi- 
tive nature is at the heart of all of these 
poems as plainly as it is in the last class 
he names — " such as try to render the 
effect of inland or woodland solitude — 
[87] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
the splendid oppression of nature at noon 
which found Utterance of old in words of 
such singular and everlasting significance 
as panic and nympholepsy. " The terror of 
noon is precisely one of those primordial 
things the fascination of which — not to 
speak of the wonder of his merely knowing 
it — stamps Swinburne's genius, in its ap- 
proach to nature, with the aboriginal mark 
of the race. With this capacity to feel the 
old mood belongs the general largeness of 
his outlook and horizon, and through both 
these traits he comes into sympathy with 
polytheistic habitudes ; at that moment of 
noon his genius hovers between the Sun- 
god in heaven and Pan on earth with an 
equal possession of mythologizing mind; 
and, in general, it is the grand features 
[88] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
and glomeration of things that holds him 
— heaven with all its stars, its winds and 
clouds; earth in great tracts of barren 
places or of "cliff and crag, lawn and 
woodland, garden and lea;" and most of 
all the sea. 

Swinburne's ocean-poetry is the crown 
of his nature verse; in it he is not only 
most exalted and fluent and vivid, but he 
winds the sea-voices truly into his song. 
He was the child of a sailor-race, and in 
his boyhood the sea was his open highway 
of dream, imagination and sentiment, of 
the vision that comes to great poets in 
their youth. It was the thing of nature 
most clung about by his spirit; the sun — 
so he represents it — had his adoration, 
but the sea his love. The sea, too, had 
[89] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
other imaginative values to him. It was his 
nature-symbol of England. The thought of 
England as the oceanic power was natural 
ever after the Armada and the Elizabethan 
poets, and in later days is supported by 
the imperial dominion spread and based 
in all directions upon the waters ; to Swin- 
burne, the singer of the Armada and the 
patriot for whom the greatness of England 
lay in that quality of race of which her sea 
greatness is the memorial in time, Eng- 
land is, as it were, the emanation of the 
sea in humanity, one thing with it and, 
one may say, the spiritual form of it ; so it 
seems to his eyes. The sea, too, is his 
nature-symbol of liberty, of that in the 
spirit of all mankind which is the greatest 
object of human effort, the condition and 
[90] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
the consummation of greatness in nations 
or men, the state of being in which alone 
they truly are at all. The historic associ- 
ation of liberty with the sea-races, from 
Athens down, helps in this idealization, 
which, in itself is natural to the thoughts 
of all men and universal in poetry. And 
again, through the operation of his own 
poetizing revery and fancy and the famil- 
iar growth of his spirit in conjunction 
with and through an environment of sea- 
experience, the sea became in Swinburne's 
secret thoughts the nature-symbol of his 
own genius, a thing of untameable and 
primitive nature blending with the cause 
of liberty and the glory of England and the 
universal hope and life of mankind ; he 
thought of himself, mythically, as the 
[91] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
child of the sea, and he repeatedly praises 
a sea-death as the appropriate end of such 
a child. 

This fancy, which is more genuine in 
feeling than might seem possible, is ex- 
pressed in many passages of his poems, but 
it is the formative idea in one distinctive 
poem, which may fairly be regarded as an 
autobiographical myth of the idealizing 
sort, such as Shelley's " Epipsychidion , " 
that entitled "Thalassius." It is a delicate 
and highly-finished work, and is also per- 
haps the most broadly instructive, the 
most comprehensive of his experience and 
theory, of any of his poems. Thai as - 
sius is the child of the Sea and of the Sun, 
and the verse relates his history from 
birth to the moment of his perfecting in 
[92] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
life, under the symbolism of classical 
mythic imagery. He is educated by a 
foster-father, and fed. 

" For bread with wisdom and with song for wine" 

after the antique manner familiar to us in 
Shelley's verse of Laon and Prince Atha- 
nase; the identification with the poet is 
made plain in the details of this in- 
struction : 

" High things the high song taught him ; 

How he that loves life overmuch shall die 

The dog's death, utterly : 

And he that much less loves it than he hates 

All wrongdoing that is done 

Anywhere always underneath the sun 

Shall live a mightier life than time's or fate's. 

[93] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

One fairer thing he shewed him, and in might 

More strong than day and night 

Whose strengths build up time's towering period : 

Yea, one thing stronger and more high than God, 

Which if man had not, then should God not be : 

And that was Liberty. 

And gladly should man die to gain, he said, 

Freedom ; and gladlier, having lost, lie dead. 

And hate the song too taught him : hate of all 

That brings or holds in thrall 

Of spirit or flesh, free-born ere God began, 

The holy body and sacred soul of man. 

And wheresoever a curse was or a chain, 

A throne for torment or a crown for bane 

Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain, 

There, said he, should man's heaviest hate be set 

Inexorably, to faint not or forget 

Till the last warmth bled forth of the last vein 

In flesh that none should call a Icing's again, 

[94] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Seeing wolves and dogs and birds that plague- 
strike air 
Leave the last bone of all the carrion bare. 

And hope the high song taught him : hope whose 

eyes 
Can sound the seas unsoundable, the skies 
Inaccessible of eyesight ; that can see 
What earth beholds not, hear what wind and sea 
Hear not, and speak what all these crying in one 
Can speak not to the sun. 
For in her sovereign eyelight all things are 
Clear as the closest seen and kindlier star 
That marries morn and even and winter and spring 
With one love's golden ring. 
For she can see the days of man, the birth 
Of good and death of evil things on earth 
Inevitable and infinite, and sure 
As present pain is, or herself is pure. 
Yea, she can hear and see, beyond all things 
That lighten from before Time's thunderous wings 

[95] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

Through the awful circle of wheel-winged periods, 
The tempest of the twilight of all Gods : 
And higher than all the circling course they ran 
The sundown of the spirit that was man." 

The body of the poem continues with the 
life experience of the hero, and at the end, 
at the moment of his perfecting, the Sun- 
god blesses him with words that may be 
taken as the ideal of the poet's life; 

" Child of my sunlight and the sea, from birth 
A fosterling and fugitive on earth ; 
Sleepless of soul as wind or wave or fire, 
A manchild with an ungrown God's desire ; 
Because thou hast loved nought mortal more than me, 
Thy father, and thy mother-hearted sea ; 
Because thou hast set thine heart to sing, and sold 
Life and life's love for song, God's living gold ; 
Because thou hast given thy flower and fire of 
youth 

[96] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

To feed mens hearts with visions, truer than truth ; 
Because thou hast kept in those world-wandering 

eyes 
The light that makes me music of the skies ; 
Because thou hast heard with world-unwearied ears 
The music that puts light into the spheres ; 
Have therefore in thine heart and in thy mouth 
The sound of song that mingles north and south, 
The song of all the winds that sing of me, 
And in thy soul the sense of all the sea" 

In this poem the nature-poetry of Swin- 
burne finds its highest and most beauti- 
ful idealization in human life; it is, in fact, 
the crowning work of his hand, in so far as 
he drew his inspiration from the life of his 
spirit with nature. 

Admirable in portraiture as the pure 
nature-poems of Swinburne are, in their 
mere rendering of scene, atmosphere and 
[97] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
landscape mood, they gain in poetic power 
in proportion as the element of human life 
is brought into them in any form, whether 
as a personal tone of the poet or as inci- 
dent, memory or vision, or as a main ac- 
tion. In "Thalassius," the idealization of 
nature is superfine and places the poem in 
the highest rank of those few imaginative 
and spiritualized allegories of life, which 
can appeal deeply only to a narrow cir- 
cle of readers in any generation, men who 
are numbered by two's and three's rather 
than by scores. In numerous poems, how- 
ever, Swinburne has blended description 
with autobiography in the most charming 
way, especially in those coast poems which 
he has associated with the name of his 
friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton, himself 
[98] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
a nature-lover with the primitive bases of 
feeling in him belonging to earlier ages and 
a more earthly generation of men; and 
also, and peculiarly, in the poems of swim- 
ming the blend of nature with life is ac- 
complished with a fine effect. The great 
instance of such a description in which 
nature is not only the scene but the giver 
of the action is the swim of Tristram in 
the dawn of the Sun just before the battle 
in which he receives his death- wounds. 
The passage is long, and fuller of pure 
natural beauty than any other scene in 
the poet's verse, and it is besides unique in 
literature, sole by itself in its saturation 
with the sea and the dawn and the joy of 
the swimmer, made one joy of all; but 
no presentation of Swinburne's nature- 
[99] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
verse can spare the concluding lines, with 
the glory of their physical delight: 

" Till the sweet change that bids the sense grow sure 
Of deeper depth and purity more pure 
Wrapped him and lapped him round with clearer 

cold, 
And all the rippling green grew royal gold 
Between him and the far sun's rising rim. 
And like the sun his heart rejoiced in him, 
And brightened with a broadening flame of mirth ; 
And hardly seemed its life a part of earth, 
But the life kindled of a fiery birth 
And passion of a new-begotten son 
Between the live sea and the living sun. 
And mightier grew the joy to meet full-faced 
Each wave, and mount with upward plunge, and 

taste 
The rapture of its rolling strength, and cross 
Its flickering crown of snows that flash and toss 
Like plumes in battles 9 blithest charge, and thence 

[100] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 

To watch the next with yet more strenuous sense ; 

Till on his eyes the light beat hard and bade 

His face turn west and shoreward through the glad 

Swift revel of the waters golden-clad 

And back with light reluctant heart he bore 

Across the broad-backed rollers in to shore" 

Such poetry brings back that early world 
in which old Triton blew his wreathed 
horn, and not in a vision only, but as the 
everlasting life of nature and man. 

Swinburne is at heart a nature-wor- 
shipper, and it is through the symbolism 
of nature that his religious instincts find 
their fullest and unimpeded flow. His 
classically reminiscent and anti-Christian 
poems alike contain a literary alloy and 
belong in substance to scholarship, to 
progress, to things of civilization, to so- 
[101] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
ciety; in proportion as he lays these things 
aside and reverts in primitive freedom to 
the world of nature, to awe of the sun and 
delight in the waves and indefinable 
moods of the moors, the barrens and the 
glens, he recaptures the original soul, be- 
comes himself purely, pours out his spirit 
directly, intensely, overflowingly, — he 
lives the poetic life. The deepest sympa- 
thies of his genius are with force, with 
things of power everywhere, with the ener- 
gies of life. The truth about him is the 
exact opposite of what has been widely 
and popularly thought; weakness, affec- 
tation, exotic foreignness, the traits of 
sestheticism in the debased sense of that 
word, are far from him ; he is strong, he is 
genuine, he is English, bred with an Eu- 
[ 102 ] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
ropean mind it is true like Shelley, like 
Gray and Milton, but in his own genius, 
temperament and the paths of his flight 
charged with the strength of England. In 
his nature-verse there is sympathy with 
power, grandeur, energy, marking the 
verse unmistakably as that of a strong 
soul; in his social verse of all kinds, politi- 
cal and religious, there is the same sym- 
pathy marking it, making it clarion-like, to 
use his own metaphor, for liberty, prog- 
ress, man, for the truth and love of the 
Revolution, for the ideal of the Republic 
as the great and single aim of the race. 
In his passion-verse there is the same 
breath of the power of life; and that fare- 
well to life in which the pagan mood ends, 
by its insistency, its poignancy, its plan- 
[103] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
gency, the sweetness of its regret, the bit- 
terness of its despair, is the death-recoil of 
a great power of life, of joy and dream and 
aspiration in youth, of a power to seize the 
things of nature and of the spirit, to live 
over again the experience, to think over 
again the thoughts of man, to have man's 
life. It belonged to so strong a nature and 
genius that the larger note should be ever 
increasing in the song, blending in widening 
harmonies, to rest in the unities of nature, 
of man, and of man's hope in society. 

VIII 

Swinburne's nature poetry has the added 
charm of affording some access to his per- 
sonality, since it is closely connected with 
his habits of life, his friendships and the 
[104] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
loved and familiar places where he has 
passed his years. Memory and compan- 
ionship have a large share in their inspira- 
tion, and the trace of French and Italian 
travel and of holidays along English 
shores is a trodden trail in the verse. He 
will remain a figure of the Northumbrian 
headlands and the South Coast forever in 
the imaginative memory of literature; 
there he is seen in the verse, alone or with 
a friend, on horseback or a-foot or a-swim, 
in his habit as he lived in his own country 
and with a love for the soil and the break- 
ing sea, his English birth. Such a back- 
ground of personality, of the human life of 
a man, is deeply desired by a poet's lovers 
who thus reach an unnoticed share in his 
privacy; it is the craving and the due of 
[105] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
their gratitude and answers to his un- 
known intimacy with their own spirits. 
A finer approach, however, is given by 
Swinburne in the numerous poems which 
he has dedicated to childhood, all of an 
intimate personal tone, and revealing his 
heart and mood and speech in the gen- 
tlest part of household privacy, in his love 
of children. The verse, as is usual with 
him, has a monotone, the permanence and 
depth of an unchangeable emotion that 
wells always from the same spring; it is 
made up of pure affection, repeated over 
and over, of kin to a child's kisses, for 
which it calls, to which it answers and 
through which it exists, a delicate, inti- 
mate, worshipping poesy, of which the like 
in English is not to be found. There is here 
[106] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
the Delphic christening of the babe, one 
after another, the birthday ode to the boy 
faithful with each revolving year, the 
death-rite of the little life in sad cadences 
of brief refrains; and unique among even 
these records of life is that rosary of daily 
song which counts the month of absence 
and gives the weariness of the child- 
emptied house through the lengthening 
hours of summer bereft of its soul. To be 
capable of such a series shows the man's 
heart better than all else in his verse ; and 
happy was the boy's head that drew this 
light to shine upon it and flash out the gold 
of the poet's affection like sunshine falling 
there in far absence, in memory, in pres- 
ence as the two heads bent together over 
the legend and the picture by the fire. The 
[107] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
sense of the household is as intimate and 
private here as in Cowper's verse ; the house 
and the garden and the hours are pure 
English ; all is native to the soil, the flower- 
age, the home of England. In this verse the 
solitary and secluded figure of the scholarly 
poet is familiarly seen in the gentlest 
associations and the happiest acts of life. 
The nature of Swinburne's personal 
life is also, though less plainly and un- 
reservedly, shown in the large number of 
poems addressed to his companions, on 
one or another occasion, but naturally 
most of these are memorial verses. He 
has been "fortunate in friendships, " and 
the hold of love in them was strong. The 
most of the friends to whom he dedicates 
verse are naturally in the group of artists 
[108] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
and men of letters with which his own 
fame is associated, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, 
William Bell Scott, Morris, Watts, Mad- 
dox-Brown, Watts-Dunton, and others, 
with whom he found his principal com- 
panionship in literary and artistic sym- 
pathy; but the list includes many besides 
these, distinguished or eminent or mem- 
orable for old association with Landor or 
Shelley or some other. A life which 
leaves so rich a personal memorial of its 
human loves, however secluded, has won 
for itself or received by its own grace one 
of the true felicities and happiest rewards 
found by man. Hardly less near than these 
attachments, the verse discloses the ties, 
as of student and master, with Landor, 
Hugo and Mazzini, which Swinburne re- 
[109] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
garded as the highest honour and greatest 
blessing upon his younger head; and in a 
degree yet further removed the verse con- 
tinues to show, with an ever greater vol- 
ume and widening range, his tribute to the 
dead masters of literature, not conven- 
tionally or perfunctorily or affectedly, but 
in a genuine and deeply-felt outpouring of 
admiration and gratitude and that strange, 
mighty love that only the dead can 
arouse, a thing of the pure and untram- 
melled soul. He was ever a lover of heroes, 
of great deeds and famous works ; for him 
the heavens of fame were constellated 
more with poetic and spiritual names than 
is the case with other men ; he was faithful 
to the pure fires there and saw the eternity 
of poetry as a flame outburning all others 
[110] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
in beauty and everlastingness ; he wor- 
shipped in his verse poetry, freedom, 
truth, and the fames that are indestruc- 
tible names of these in human memory. 
"On the Cliffs" is a poem in which there 
is both the vision and the rhapsody of this, 
in very noble and unusual imaginative 
forms, and stands as the type of his mood 
toward fame, which for him more truly 
than for men at large was what Shelley 
called it "love disguised." In all this vol- 
ume of human appreciation, for the great 
fames of the past, for the elder masters 
who touched him with their hands, for the 
company of familiar friends in private life, 
there is to be observed the same strength 
of soul, the same affluence of response to 
life, the same capacity for the passion of 

[in] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
life in its largeness which has already 
been spoken of as the fundamental thing 
in the poet's nature, but here seen in its 
noblest phase as a power to love. 

IX 

Liberty, melody, passion, fate, nature, 
love and fame are the seven chords which 
the poet's hand, from its first almost boy- 
hood touch upon the lyre, has swept now 
for two score years with music that has 
been blown through the world. He sang in 
the lines of his earliest dedication, in the 
opening lines of it, — 

" The sea gives her shells to the shingle, 
The earth gives her streams to the sea ; 

They are many, but my gift is single. 
My verses, the first fruits of me." 

[112] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
and a certain singleness has abided in the 
gift to the end. He has been faithful to his 
early lights, his first loves, and has served 
the ideal of his life with an unswerving 
rectitude, a tireless industry and an un- 
flinching courage. He has been the lau- 
reate of the Republic in Europe as the 
continental cause of liberty in every ty- 
rannic or partially enfranchised land; he 
has been a national poet of England, and 
has besides enriched English literature 
with a music never heard before, with the 
most stately tragedies of his time, and with 
its most imaginative romantic poem of 
passion and with a multitude of noble 
single poems of great variety of theme, 
mood and art. He has supplemented this 
poetic gift with a large body of prose 
[113] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
which contains the wealth of a poet's ap- 
preciation of a main portion of the most 
famous English literature as well as of the 
greatest modern poetic mind of France, — 
a treasure of intuitive criticism such as no 
other English poet has left. This is the 
fruit of a long labour of life. Strength is 
dominant in his genius; the things of 
strength are in his verse ; it is English gen- 
ius and English strength, racial in lyric 
power, in free intellect, in bold speech, — 
none more so — and English also in its 
poetic scholarly tradition.The reversionary 
tendency of his art, the imaginative re- 
moteness of his themes, the primitive pre- 
dilection of his temperament have been 
pointed out, with the resulting detachment 
of his genius in important ways from his 
[114] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
own age and generation; but if a certain 
aloofness has come into his work from 
these causes, he has been thereby with- 
drawn into what is most primary in art 
and most elemental in nature and life. He 
has been genuine, as only high genius can 
be, in all that he has done. In private life 
he has lived in seclusion ; but he has been 
one of a company of sympathetic friends, 
and has besides numbered among his 
companions many others of the men of 
distinction of his times. He has never 
failed in public sympathy with great oc- 
casions and events. As a poet, notwith- 
standing his genius and labour, it must be 
said he found the world inhospitable. The 
measure of praise that he won has gone no 
further than the acknowledgment of the 
[115] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
victory of a poetic power that could not be 
denied; it has not much increased with 
years ; it has never been adequate, just or 
intelligent. There is, perhaps, the con- 
sciousness of this in the concluding words 
of his remarks on his collected verse, 
which he addresses to his friend and 
house- mate through these latter years: 
"It is nothing to me that what I write 
should find immediate or general accep- 
tance; it is much to know that, on the 
whole, it has won for me the right to ad- 
dress this dedication and inscribe this 
edition to you. " The poet, like all men of 
simple greatness, is free, it would seem, 
from the desire for applause, but not from 
the human want of some loving comrade- 
ship in his art. There are, in the wide 
[116] 



ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
world, here and there a few — a number 
that will increase ever with passing gener- 
ations and is even now perhaps manyfold 
greater than the poet knows — in whose 
hearts his poetry is lodged with power. 

THE END 



THE MoCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK 



[117] 



CONTEMPORARY MEN OF LETTERS SERIES 
WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY, EDITOR 



THE purpose of this series is to provide brief but compre- 
hensive sketches, biographical and critical, of living writers 
and of those who, though dead, may still properly be re- 
garded as belonging to our time. There is a legitimate 
interest in the lives of our contemporaries that is quite dis- 
tinct from mere personal curiosity. There is also, in spite 
of the obvious limitations of contemporary criticism, a 
justifiable ambition to arrive at some final estimate of the 
literary production of our age in advance of posterity. It 
is to satisfy so far as possible this ambition and this interest 
that the present series is planned. European as well as 
English and American men of letters are included, so as to 
give a complete survey of the intellectual and artistic life of 
an age that is characteristically cosmopolitan. It is also 
often called a decadent age, and it has therefore a varied 
outlook on life. The diverse and often conflicting points of 
view that we thus meet with in modern poets and prose 
writers are all treated intelligently and sympathetically by 
writers especially qualified in every instance, although the 
prevailing temper of the series is idealistic. 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO., 



IN THE SAME SERIES 

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS AND THE IRISH 
LITERARY REVIVAL 

BY HORATIO SHEAFE KRANS 

INCLUDING A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MR. YEATS' PUBLISHED WORK. 

"A very timely and very satisfactory little volume." 

Hartford Courant. 

"A bright and interesting little study." St. Paul Despatch. 

"Admirable addition to an admirable series." 

Brooklyn Times. 

"A study of critical insight and genuine appreciation." 

Denver, Col. News-Times. 

"An excellent appreciation of Mr. Yeats, and a good intro- 
duction to the more popular selections of old Irish literature." 

Salt Lake City Tribune. 

" Of Mr. Krans' criticism of Mr. Yeats' work, his ideas, 
his attitude toward life and its problems, it would be difficult 
to speak in too high praise." Christian Work & Evangelist. 

"A safe guide for one embarking on a course of Mr. Yeats, 
and it is full of well-chosen quotations from the poems that 
have been inspired in the last decade by the return to imagina- 
tion which is the aim of the Irish poet and his friends." 

N. Y. Eve. Post. 

" The book will serve as a guide to be relied upon in taking 
the neophyte straight to the heart of the movement; to those 
who are already pledged and devoted to Mr. Yeats as a vital — 
some say the most vital — force in contemporary English litera- 
ture, the book will appeal as an admirable appreciation of his 
work, done by one like-minded with themselves." The Dial. 



IN THE SAME SERIES 

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

BY MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS 

wife of warner's first publisher; containing a hither- 
to UNPUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MR. 
WARNER AND MR. W. D. HOWELL8. 

"A brief book, but it is pure gold." Burlington Post. 

"A singularly satisfactory estimate." Newark News. 

" Warmed throughout by a sentiment of intimate apprecia- 
tion." N. Y. Nation. 

"An appreciative and sympathetic tribute to a most genial 
man and author." Critic, N. Y. 

"A pleasant sketch of a man well worth knowing and is 
written in a spirit of loving appreciation." Los Angeles Times. 

"A respectful tribute to one of the most graceful of our 
essayists, one of the finest examples of the best American citi- 
zenship, and of the kindest of men." Chicago Eve. Post. 

" She (Mrs. Fields) tells the story of his youth charmingly, 
and her little biography is all the better for being the work of 
a life-long and intimate friend." N.Y. Times. 

" Mrs. Fields has succeeded in recalling the charm of Mr. 
Warner's manner, his delightful humor, the elementary quality 
of boyishness which made him so attractive a companion, and 
which also made him one of the most effective teachers of his 
generation." N Y. Outlook. 

" The American people owe much to this sweet and genial 
spirit, as lovable as Stevenson, as gentle as Charles Lamb, and 
as quaintly humorous as both with a whimsical earnestness 
entirely his own; and this little volume will be an excellent 
method by which they may learn to realize their indebted- 
ness." Pittsburg Post. 



PRESS COMMENTS ON THE SERIES 

"Promises to be a useful as well as a beautiful series. 
. . . The publishers who have put it forth have done 
notably good work in bookmaking of late and these vol- 
umes . . . are fitted to adorn any shelves." 

Providence Journal 

" In typographical make-up these volumes far excel the 
other literary monographs on the market." 

Philadelphia Press. 

" The volumes are made up with all the taste which dis- 
tinguishes the books that come from their publisher and 
promise well." The Independent. 

" Begins not only well but brilliantly. Its future issues 
will receive close attention, thanks to the sterling qualities 
of its first two issues." N. Y. Mail and Express. 

" These handy volumes are just the thing for busy people 
who like to know something about the men of letters of the 
passing generation." Church Standard. 

" A wide circle of readers will be grateful for this new 
biographical series. From the quality ... of these 
initial volumes it is safe to predict that this series will take 
rank with the English Men of Letters Series and the Amer- 
ican Men of Letters Series. Readers constantly feel the 
need of just such compact and yet readable biographies, 
and of a thin volume print, and in undertaking this series 
the publishers are rendering a service of distinct value to all 
readers interested in things literary." Journal of Pedagogy. 



IN PREPARATION 

GEORGE MEREDITH 

By G. K. CHESTERTON 

AUTHOR OF " ROBERT BROWNING," " HERETIC," ETC. 



NOV 



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